Artwork
--
Laura Ruby

In
1995 Laura Ruby exhibited her "Nancy Drew
Series" of prints and an installation
sculpture, The Mystery of the Open Book,
at the Honolulu Academy of Arts. The series
has also been exhibited in Georgia, Nebraska,
Texas, Iowa, Ohio, New York, at the Ramsay
Galleries in Honolulu in 2000, and at the
Honolulu Academy of Arts in 2005. Her essay
and selections of her prints from the "Nancy
Drew Series" are published in Rediscovering
Nancy Drew (University of Iowa Press,
1995).

In
1994 she completed a large site-specific
sculpture, Chinatown–Site of Passage,
commissioned by the City and County of
Honolulu. She also received a grant from the
Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions to create
and exhibit an installation sculpture, A
View with a Room, at the Hawaii Loa
College Gallery.

Recently
her prints and sculptures have been shown in
national and international juried and
invitational exhibitions in Pennsylvania,
Washington, Illinois, Minnesota, Louisiana,
Texas, New York, Kansas, California,
Wisconsin, Oregon, Japan and elsewhere.
Currently her print Landed
Committee–Annexation, part of her
ongoing “Diamond Head Series,” is included in
the inaugural exhibition at the Hawai‘i State
Art Museum, and she was one of the
Invitational Artists for 2003 in the “Artists
of Hawai‘i” exhibition held annually at the
Honolulu Academy of Arts.

Mo‘ili‘ili–The
Life
of a Community, edited by Laura Ruby,
was published in January 2006. Honolulu
Town will be published in May 2012.

This site-specific
sculpture is conceived with the following themes
and design components: it is an architectural
and theatrical space which invites participation
by viewers walking through and around, or
sitting leisurely, and possible performers,
actors, musicians or dancers. The overall design
also refers to stage or cinematic set design--mise
en scène--which is always human scale and
participatory.

In terms of the
site-specific nature of my sculpture various
components make particular reference to features
of the Honolulu Community College campus and
Iwilei neighborhood. For example, the blue
rectangular terrazzo "stream" refers to the
nearby Kapalama Canal; the bridge refers to the
Dillingham Bridge over the canal; the arches
have reference to the Library Building and to
the small arch details on the Dillingham Bridge;
and the five stylized pineapples relate to the
giant cannery water tower.

Some of the specific
design elements include: an interconnected
sequence of arches, a tower, bridge, and
stairway on raised platforms. This work also
contains such specific features as a flag and
curved connecting cables. One the ground plane,
besides the stylized pineapples, is a geometric
design comprised of brick, terrazzo and grass
patterns. Some of the materials are: colored
concrete, brass plate, aluminum plate, stainless
steel cable, terrazzo, Alapai Bus Barn bricks,
ceramic tile and emerald zoysia grass.

This
site-specific sculpture features the Honolulu
Chinatown and waterfront neighborhood, including
its history and physical structures. The
sculpture has visual allusions to Nuuanu Stream
bridges, here in Chinatown red; profiles and
rooflines of nearby buildings; and shapes of
doorways, windows and awnings in the community.

The
locale includes the busy port, a site of
passage, and visual references include ship
forms, portholes and even the honu
(green sea turtles) that swam there.

The
sculpture also honors Don Francisco de Paula
Marin of Spain, trader, seafarer and trusted
business associate for Kamehameha I. Marin's
Hawaiian name was Manini and this
location of his home was previously known as Kou.
Marin brought the first mangos to Hawaii, and
his wine grapes gave the name to nearby Vineyard
Street.

This
sculpture is entitled "Cromlech"--that's a Welsh
word meaning a type of stone monument. Stone
monuments have been built in all parts of the
world for thousands of years. Throughout the
world people would place stones upon stones
sometimes for religious purposes--to make a
temple--or to mark a sacred place--or to make
tombs, places of rest for the dead--or to make
walls marking sacred places as in places of
refuge for the weary or defeated warrior. Stone
monuments were also used as meeting places for
community festivals and sometimes even for
scientific purposes, as astronomical calendars.
An example of the latter is the famous
Stonehenge monument in Britain.

Such
stone structures whether as temples, heiau,
tombs, gathering places or calendars often had
an artistic purpose also. That is, they were
made as visually interesting as possible. So
whatever else they were, they were also
sculptures.

This
particular sculpture by Laura Ruby refers to
man's historical natural instinct to place stone
upon stone for religious, scientific or artistic
purposes. In this sculpture, the progression of
rough and craggy stones on one side to smooth
geometric stones on the other reflects man's
mastery and control of materials from ancient
times to the modern machine age.

On the
surfaces of the sculpture are figures showing
men and women engaged in various work
activities--carrying water, sowing seeds,
tending animals, hunting, fishing and others.

My "Nancy
Drew Series" of screenprints takes as its primary
reference the fictional detective, Nancy Drew, the
subject of an extremely popular series of books in
American culture. The character Nancy Drew
represents the independence and problem-solving
intelligence of the detective figure, while also
alluding to the independence, creativity and
determination of the artist. The first obvious
punning relationship is in the name, Drew, but the
series of prints employs both playful and serious
multiple visual and verbal interactions in its
concept and design.The
multiple levels of visual/verbal interplay
incorporate references to the tools and processes of
art making, including allusions to numerous codes
and sign systems. For example, The Clue of the
Black Keys contains historical and
contemporary musical notational systems (including
Chopin's "Black Key Étude") and a typewriter schema;
while The Clue of the Tapping Heels contains
Morse code and The Secret of the Brass Bound
Trunk includes semaphore. Each individual
print, of course, includes far more imagery and
conceptual material in addition to these notational
systems, and as a series the prints have much
interplay and interaction of concept and imagery.
Other subject matter includes such popular culture
elements as comedy films, mystery films, popular
music and others.My "Nancy Drew Series" encourages
viewer involvement in the search for clues and
understanding. One major theme of the series is the
acknowledging of the artist/detective as maker and
the viewer as an involved participant in the
detection.

Diamond Head is one of the
most recognizable landmarks on earth--a dormant, if
not extinct, volcano, known in Hawaiian as Laeahi.
Laeahi is comprised of lae which means
both forehead and headland, and ahi, both a
yellowfin tuna and fire. One of the recurring images
in this series of screenprints and mixed media prints
is the geological profile of Diamond Head as the
dorsal fin of an ahi. The visual forms of
these prints--my artistic choices--derive from my
fascination with this volcanic cone's entire cultural
history. They include ancient Hawaiian lore and
mythology, as well as contemporary governmental and
military uses of Diamond Head. In
exploring this cultural history, these prints contain
allusions to the mythological origins of the Hawaiian
people, their emblematic bringer of peace, Lono,
and their warrior god Ku. Contemporary
manifestation of this ancient theme might be seen in
the sharp contrast between the astonishing physical
beauty and peacefulness of Diamond Head, on the one
hand, and the numerous twentieth century military
structures--concrete bunkers, remnants of gun
emplacements, tunnels, and hidden stairways throughout
the crater. The arbitrary appropriations of land
and exploitation of people and animals in Hawai'i also
appear in my work. Some victims of these cultural
processes, for example, are the 'i'iwi and 'o'o,
beautiful now extinct birds, sacrificed for capes and
other ornaments. The enlightened Hawaiian land
division, ahupua'a gave people access to both
land and sea, but ultimately restricted people's
movements and fractured the islands. Diamond Head
has been divided, arbitrarily broken up, and scarred
by its various controllers and possessors, just as the
Hawaiian land itself has been. Thus, my prints include
the recurrent theme of mahele, the Hawaiian
division of land, or general shattering of space.

"Diamond Head
Series" Installation Sculptures

Hustling Sandalwood

mixed media installation
sculpture

2001

This sculpture uses
a fractured pool table, an elitist luxury item
desired by Hawaiian ali'i, to exemplify
the triangular sandalwood trade between New
England traders and manufacturers and Chinese
merchants. Highly valued sandalwood was produced
by the labor of the maka'ainana
commoners of Hawai'i. The sculpture alludes to
the depleted, denuded and eroded fractured
landscape of the Hawaiian Islands. A pool table
also implies elements of chance in this serious
economic game, as well as the more controlled
hustle of the lucrative sandalwood trade.

Moah Moa

mixed media installation
sculpture

2001

My
installation sculpture Moah Moa (moa is
the Hawaiian word for chicken and "moah" is
local pidgin for "more") intends to be a
cultural and political statement about how
hate-mongering and fear-mongering in the name of
Hawaiian sovereignty rebounds against those with
the harshest rhetoric. "The chickens have come
home to roost" was spurred by the infamous
statement by Malcolm X when President Kennedy
was killed. Huli means to turn, to turn
over like a cresting wave, or in common
parlance, "huli huli chicken" means
specially grilled/roasted chicken usually for
fund-raisers.